Exhaustion and Emotional Labor

What a year it's been! (Understatement much, Dave??) 

Seriously, this has been a demanding year for me as a teacher. I am not complaining. I'm so grateful that I've been able to be regularly meeting up with my students in person. I'm equally grateful for the technological support to make online and hybrid teaching realistic, if not easy. Several months ago I wrote a baleful post entitled "Teaching is Not for the Faint of Heart...and HyFlex Teaching in Particular." Looking back at this post...I don't disagree with anything I wrote then. But I'm grateful that I didn't have as many students shunted into quarantine during this spring semester (questions remain about why this is...) which has made managing the times I need to try and teach in multiple modalities simultaneously much more reasonable, at an emotional level at least.

That comment, "at an emotional level," is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. I am feeling exhausted as we reach the end of this year. I always feel a little tired at the close of an academic year. But this year it's more than "a little tired." I described it to a colleague today as "exhaustion." And I don't want to sound hyperbolic here; I think this is accurate. Teaching is demanding work under the best of circumstances. Teaching during COVID has not been the best of circumstances. And, self-indulgent as it sounds, not having a spring break this year has taken a real toll on me. I understand why we did it this way--and I DO think it was the right call--but I also think that this disruption to our normal rhythm of the semester has had a real impact. My students are tired, but hanging in there. My colleagues are tired, but hanging in there. I'm tired too...and hanging in there, I think.

But this comes back to the idea of "emotional labor" that I've been thinking about a fair amount over this year. Back in October I wrote an article entitled "How Can We Support Teachers?" that draws on this concept quite lot. On our podcast, my buddy Matt and I spent a whole episode thinking through Emotional Labor for teachers, and how demanding this is for educators. The main idea of emotional labor: some work is physical, some is mental, and some is emotional. Emotional labor means managing your own emotional state to elicit a particular emotional state in others--and teachers do this all the time. We aren't the only ones, of course; nurses, police officers, social workers, flight attendants, and so many "serving" professions demand a level of emotional labor. But I think this is ever more acute for teachers working in the age of COVID. We often check our own emotions as a normal part of the work, to ensure students will learn.

Physical labor can be (obviously) exhausting. Mental labor can be exhausting. And...emotional labor can be exhausting. 

This year, the emotional labor of teaching is putting more pressure than ever on teachers, I think. And while I'm pretty resilient, and I LOVE my work, I'm also finding myself looking forward to the weekends more than I think I ever have since I've been a professional educator.

Check in on the educators you know, friends. I suspect I'm not alone in this exhaustion about the emotional labor of teaching. 

And, how to manage this exhaustion? Well...what makes sense? 

When we are exhausted...we need to rest. 

And so, I'm working on resting more this year than I ever have before. This semester I've been trying to not work in the evenings more than two nights a week. (I'm certainly not always successful at this.) I'm trying to not check my email over the weekends. I'm trying to get to bed at a regular time and get up at a regular time. I'm trying to get at least some physical exercise every week. Isn't that crazy to say "I'm working on resting"--working on resting??? But it's true; this is where I'm at, emotionally.

I'm still feeling exhausted...but I'm (perhaps surprisingly?) still feeling deep joy in my work. But it ain't easy, folks.

Image via Pixabay